William Julius Wilson

When Work Disappears

For the first time in the twentieth century most adults in many innercity ghetto neighborhoods are not working in a typical week. The disappearance of work has adversely affected not only individuals, families, and neighborhoods, but the social life of the city at large as well. Inner-city joblessness is a severe problem that is often overlooked or obscured when the focus is placed mainly on poverty and its consequences. Despite increases in the concentration of poverty since 1970, inner cities have always featured high levels of poverty, but the current levels of joblessness in some neighborhoods are unprecedented. The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of todays problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoodscrime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so onare fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work. The disappearance of work and the growth of related problems in the ghetto have aggravated an already tense racial situation in urban areas. Our nations response to racial discord in the central city and to the growing racial divide between the city and the suburbs has been disappointing. In discussing these problems we have a tendency to engage in the kind of rhetoric that exacerbates, rather than alleviates, urban and metropolitan racial tensions. Ever since the 1992 Los Angeles riot, the media have focused heavily on the factors that divide rather than those that unite racial groups. Emphasis on racial division peaked in 1995 following the jurys verdict in the 0. J. Simpson murder trial. Before

The Effects of Neighborhood Disadvantage on Adolescent Development

A conceptual framework for studying emerging neighborhood effects on individual development is presented, identifying specific mechanisms and processes by which neighborhood disadvantage influences adolescent developmental outcomes. Using path analyses, the authors test the hypothesis that these organizational and cultural features of neighborhoods mediate the effects of ecological disadvantage on adolescent development and behavior; they then estimate the unique contribution of neighborhood effects on development using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). The study involves samples of neighborhoods from two sites, Chicago and Denver. The analyses support the hypothesis that the effects of ecological disadvantage are mediated by specific organizational and cultural features of the neighborhood. The unique influence of neighborhood effects is relatively small, but in most cases these effects account for a substantial part of the variance explained by the HLM model.

The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City

Discussions of inner-city social dislocations are often severed from the struggles and structural changes in the larger society, economy, and polity that in fact determine them, resulting in undue emphasis on the individual attributes of ghetto residents and on the alleged grip of the so-called culture of poverty. This article provides a different perspective by drawing attention to the specific features of the proximate social structure in which ghetto residents evolve and try to survive. This is done by contrasting the class composition, welfare trajectories, economic and financial assets, and social capital of blacks who live in Chicagos ghetto neighborhoods with those who reside in this citys low-poverty areas. Our central argument is that the interrelated set of phenomena captured by the term “underclass” is primarily social-structural and that the inner city is experiencing a crisis because the dramatic growth in joblessness and economic exclusion associated with the ongoing spatial and industrial restructuring of American capitalism has triggered a process of hyperghettoization.

The Ghetto underclass : social science perspectives

The Underclass - William Julius Wilson Issues, Perspectives, and Public Policy The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City - Lo[um]ic J D Wacquant and William Julius Wilson Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass - John D Kasarda Absent Fathers in the Inner City - Mercer L Sullivan Sex Codes and Family Life Among Poor Inner-City Youths - Elijah Anderson Employment and Marriage Among Inner-City Fathers - Mark Testa et al Single Mothers, The Underclass, and Social Policy - Sara McLanahan and Irwin Garfinkel Puerto Ricans and the Underclass Debate - Marta Tienda Immigration and the Underclass - Robert D Reischauer The Urban Homeless - Peter H Rossi and James D Wright A Portrait of Urban Dislocation Equal Opportunity and the Estranged Poor - Jennifer L Hochschild The Logic of Workfare - Lawrence M Mead The Underclass and Work Policy Institutional Change and the Challenge of the Underclass - Richard P Nathan

Another Look at The Truly Disadvantaged

In the aftermath of the controversy generated in 1965 by the Moynihan report on the black family, empirical research on inner-city poverty and other social dislocations ground to a halt. In the past few years, however, such research activity has revived as media reports and debates among academics have captured public interest in the growing problems of urban ghettos. Like the 1960s discussions of the causes and consequences of urban poverty that focused on the Moynihan report and on Oscar Lewiss work on the culture of poverty, much of the new discourse is contentious and acrimonious. My book, The TrulyDisadvantaged, has become a point of reference in this controversy and, as is too often true of controversies, a good deal of the discussion is based on inaccurate interpretations of the arguments set forth.1

Why Both Social Structure and Culture Matter in a Holistic Analysis of Inner-City Poverty

A complex web of racialist and nonracialist structural forces, along with cultural forces, have adversely impacted life in inner-city black neighborhoods. Yet a number of studies have raised questions about the real effects of living in such neighborhoods, including the widely cited studies on the Moving to Opportunity experiment. The author highlights studies that provide compelling evidence for considering the cumulative effects of residing in poor segregated neighborhoods. While some of these are structural, others are cultural, such as the effects of prolonged exposure to cultural traits that originate from or are the products of racial exclusion. Advancing the argument that structural conditions provide the context within which cultural responses to chronic economic and racial subordination are developed, the author suggests a holistic public policy perspective whereby the complex web of structural and cultural factors that create and reinforce racial inequality is recognized and appreciated. To illustrate this perspective, he highlights the Harlem Children’s Zone, which President Obama has identified as a model for the creation of a national program of “promised neighborhoods” to address chronic racial and economic subordination.

The role of theory in ethnographic research

■ Scholars, including urban poverty researchers, have not seriously debated the important issues that Loïc Wacquant raised in his controversial review of books by Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier, and Katherine Newman concerning the disconnect between theory and ethnographic research. Despite the tone of Wacquant’s review, we feel that he made a contribution in raising important issues about the role of theory in ethnography. The responses to his review that address this issue, especially those by Anderson and Duneier, are also important because they help to broaden our understanding of how theory is used in ethnographic research. What we take from this exchange is that good ethnography is theory driven, and is likely to be much more reflective of inductive theoretical insights than those that are purely deductive. Moreover, we show that in some ethnographic studies the theoretical insights are neither strictly deductive nor inductive, but represent a combination of both.

The Underclass: Issues, Perspectives, and Public Policy

This article critically reviews the other articles in this volume and integrates some of their major arguments. Attention is given to the substantive arguments advanced by each author and how they relate to the points raised by the other authors. In conclusion, the policy recommendations put forth in several of the articles are assessed.

Cycles of Deprivation and the Underclass Debate

In the mid-1960s, liberal scholars forcefully and candidly discussed the rise of social dislocations in the inner city and effectively challenged conservative arguments regarding the culture and behavior of the ghetto underclass. This article attempts to explain why the liberal perspective on the ghetto underclass has now receded into the background and why the conservative perspective enjoys wide and increasing currency. A suggestion is made as to how the liberal perspective might be refocused to regain its influence and thereby provide a more balanced intellectual discussion of why the problems in the inner city sharply increased when they did and in the way that they did.

When Work Disappears: New Implications for Race and Urban Poverty in the Global Economy

This paper discusses the impact of growing joblessness and dwindling work opportunities on inner-city areas in America. The lack of low-skilled manual work in the inner city is linked to poverty, crime, family dissolution and the social life of neighbourhoods. The paper discusses this impact at a neighbourhood-wide, family and individual level, noting the interaction between these levels and the intergenerational repercussions that result. The paper goes on to look at race in this context, identifying a new form of cultural racism. It examines the way race becomes an issue as black people become disproportionately represented in neighbourhoods where there is a high ratio of joblessless and very few work opportunities. The paper shows how this segregation plus its interaction with other changes in society, escalates rates of neighbourhood joblessness and compounds existing problems in these neighbourhoods. Finally the paper examines the role of public policy, the way it has exacerbated inner-city joblessness and how it attempted to resolve the problem, but failed. The paper concludes by pointing to a way forward to improve work opportunities for all sectors of society that are struggling to make ends meet, including inner-city poor and the working- and middle- classes.